Cardboard and ice are causing some problems, but county officials and citizens seem satisfied so far with the Lenawee County recycling facility opened in November in Adrian.

“All in all, I feel things are going pretty well,” said Robert Knoblauch, vice chairman of a committee that oversees the county’s solid waste department.

The facility at Race and River streets uses automatic electric compactors to reduce trucking costs for collected material. Ice build-up and large cardboard boxes have been an occasional problem, the committee was told at its meeting on Wednesday.

The volume of material being collected is meeting expectations and is continuing to grow, Knoblauch said.

Five bins of compacted material, weighing a reported total of 44,580 pounds, were shipped to a processing facility in Ann Arbor between Dec. 12 and Jan. 15.

The collection site was closed for a time last weekend and reopened Monday, said county administrator Martin Marshall. Ice has occasionally built up in the compactor chamber, causing it to jam, he said. There have also been problems with large cardboard boxes jamming in the chute.

Knoblauch said the compactor has also jammed when users drop material into the chute while the compactor is in operation.

The collection site may need more maintenance attention than anticipated over weekends when the county’s building and grounds staff is not available, Knoblauch said. A contract with a local resident covers only opening and closing gates to the facility at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. each day.

Knoblauch said the committee is still planning to partner with local governments and groups to establish up to three satellite collection sites around the county, using an automatic compactor at each site. Host communities may have to participate in maintaining the collection sites, he said.

The satellite sites would replace a county-funded Saturday morning collection program at Devils Lake, Loch Erin and Macon. Costs for operating the manned Saturday morning program ranged from an average $221 a ton at the Devils Lake site to $300 a ton at Loch Erin during 2012, according to solid waste department reports. A discontinued site in Rome Township had an average cost of $351 a ton.